


Too Late To Save You

by Eustacia Vye (eustaciavye)



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-06
Updated: 2010-10-06
Packaged: 2017-10-12 11:28:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/124381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eustaciavye/pseuds/Eustacia%20Vye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She had always insisted that her name was Ariadne, but that wasn't what they had in their files. They kept shoving pills at her, but she refused to take them. This was her reality before Arthur came along to break her out.</p><p>For the inception_kink prompt: <a href="http://community.livejournal.com/inception_kink/9327.html?thread=17481839#t17481839">Arthur breaks patient #025981 out of a Swiss mental asylum to help him in his hardest job yet.</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	Too Late To Save You

She had always insisted that her name was Ariadne, but that wasn't what they had in their files. It was something mundane she refused to acknowledge, and that always seemed to irritate her captors. They kept her under lock and key, in clothes not her own and within drab gray walls. It was industrial grade, obviously a hospital of some kind. They kept shoving pills at her, but she refused to take them. Sometimes they allowed it, sometimes she had to yell and scream and shout and swing at them all to get them to leave her the hell alone. But that often led to needles and drugs and a stupor that lasted for hours. She tried not to go that route.

"You have a visitor, hon," said one of the nurses. This one was one of the nicer ones, that only coaxed her with words to take the pills she didn't need. Some of the others resorted to threats, but this one honestly believed she needed the pills. Sometimes Ariadne took them, if only to see her smile.

The man that was visiting looked vaguely familiar, though Ariadne couldn't place why. He was wearing a vest over a button down shirt, the top button undone, cuffs rolled up along his arms. The watch at his wrist was thick and chunky, and Ariadne could only imagine it as a heavy weapon smashing against someone's face. He had her chart in front of him, a thick and massive tome by now. There was no use in scribbling notes; day after day she repeated the same tales and no one believed her.

She had broken into a man's mind along with a team of other criminals and made him crumble his father's empire to pieces. She was wealthier than she ever thought she would be, but the guilt had weighed her down. She had been alone after that, and one horrible thing after another had led her to Switzerland and the current place she was in. She didn't know where the others were, didn't know if the names they had given her were even correct.

In this place, no one believed her. She had a mundane name and wasn't an architecture graduate student. She was a Swiss woman that had been educated in the United States but had cracked under the pressure and returned home. Upon her return, however, her parents had been killed in an accident and she was alone. It had been enough to make her mind shatter the rest of the way, and the complex universe she had built for herself was her way to cope.

Ariadne refused to believe she was schizophrenic. That was for people that saw things, heard voices. She _knew_ she was right, even if she couldn't prove it. Professor Miles must have returned to the US after the job, must have retired. She had finished her classes, so there was no one she knew at the school at the moment. Her father had died when she was eight and her mother died while she was in college. She was an only child; that was the only detail the Swiss had gotten right. She built things as an architecture student, and had done amazing things in the dreamscape, but for the real world she was limited by pen and paper. Her sketches all felt flat now, and she lost that feeling wonder whenever she looked at a blank sketch pad.

The man in front of her gestured for her to sit. He watched her flop into the chair, watched her pick at the snarls in her hair with disinterested fingers. He tapped the medical record, 025981 across the top instead of her name. She was reduced to a number here, and they never got her name right.

"Ariadne," the man murmured softly. "I'm here to help."

Her ears perked up. He'd used her real name, so he must know her true history. "How do you propose to do that?" she asked, pushing her knotted hair behind her ears.

"What's the last thing you remember before coming here?"

She frowned at the question, and even more so when she realized she had no answer for him. "I used to be in Paris. I think," Ariadne said softly. "They gave me things. Pills and shots, and they turned out the lights at odd hours. I don't know how long I've been here."

The man gestured toward the hospital record. "It was a long time, Ariadne. It took me a long time to find you. It's a big, wide world out there, and it's about time you started living in it again." There was something about his smirk that was familiar. _It was worth a shot,_ he had once said, but she couldn't place the context. "I have the plans set. I just need a good time to do it. Probably shift change."

"Why are you doing this?" Ariadne asked, frowning.

"I have a tough job ahead of me, Ariadne. I need your help."

"Me," Ariadne replied flatly, disbelief in her tone.

"I have a job for you."

 _Is that like a work placement?_ she had asked once to a different man. It felt so long ago now, like a different lifetime.

"I don't have any skills anymore. They saw to that here."

He shook his head. "I don't believe that." He indicated the patient record. "There's enough in here to lead me to believe that you'd be the best for this particular job."

"You don't think I'm crazy?"

"I think they got it all wrong. I think they're scared of what you can do." He leaned forward and stuck his hand out. "I'm Arthur." He shook her hand solemnly. "Get yourself ready, Ariadne. I'm breaking you out at shift change."

***

It had been almost ridiculously easy to slip her out of the hospital. Arthur had palmed a few key cards and a white coat that he had Ariadne wear. During shift change, all the nurses were giving report in the conference room. There was only the unit clerk at the desk, though she was putting in the orders for dinner at the computer and wasn't paying attention. Arthur walked closest to the unit clerk and made sure to appear busy. He was tall and hid Ariadne's petite frame easily. The white coat dwarfed her thin frame, but with her hair washed, combed and pulled back, she looked like any other medical resident walking along with her attending.

It didn't hit her until she was outside the facility. The air was crisp and cool, and she could feel the breeze on her face. She pulled her hair tie out and let the wind whip through the strands in delight.

Arthur watched her with a sad smile for a moment. "Come on. We'd better get out of here before they realize you're gone. I don't want to see what would happen then."

Ariadne hurried to match his longer strides. He had a car in the lot, and she thought at first that security would pitch a fit when she was noticed in the passenger seat. But no one even spared her a glance, and there were no cameras to be seen. She turned around in her seat as Arthur drove off, fingers clutching the headrest tight. The asylum retreated in the distance, no indication that anyone knew what was going on.

How could it be so easy?

She slumped in her seat when she turned around. She could feel Arthur's eyes on her, and it made her skin crawl. "What?"

"Are you sorry you're out of there?"

"They kept trying to convince me I'm someone I'm not. So no, I'm not sorry."

He smiled, a dimple in his cheek. "And who are you, then?"

"You tell me. You're the one willing to break out a crazy chick."

"You're not crazy, Ariadne," he said, his voice taking on a lost and sad note. "You're just lost."

The words didn't sit right somehow, and an unsettled feeling ran through her. "So who am I?"

"You're brilliant at architecture. That's what I need right now. I need an architect."

"Plenty of gifted minds out there that aren't crazy," she said with a churlish tone. "Why me?"

"Why not you?"

"Everyone thinks I'm crazy. They all think everything I've ever said is a lie."

"I don't think you're crazy, Ariadne," Arthur said softly. He kept his eyes on the road. "And I need your help."

"What do you need help with?" she asked, looking at his profile. She had the urge to touch his arm, to assure him it would all be okay. She squelched the urge ruthlessly; she didn't know him and she didn't know what he was asking. She was grateful to be out of the hospital, but she didn't know if this situation was going to be any better.

"I need a maze, but it can't look like one. It needs to look like city streets, buildings, tunnels, roads, the works. I need a world that looks real, even if it isn't. I need an architect to fill in the details that matter, to help make a place that feels comfortable."

"You're talking about dreams. _Dream_ architecture."

"Yeah." He flashed her a smile before turning back to the road. "That's exactly what I'm asking for."

"Why?"

"I need to save a friend. Something happened, I'm still not entirely sure what." Arthur's tone was dark, as if this was still something he was beating himself up over. "I made a mistake somehow, and I need to save my friend."

"So does this friend of yours have a name?"

He smiled, but kept his eyes on the road. "Yeah, but I don't think she liked it too much."

"Oh."

"Oh?"

"It's _that_ kind of friend?"

Now his smile turned wistful, and Ariadne felt a twinge of regret in her chest. "No, she wasn't. But I'd hoped she could be. It just never happened."

"I'm sorry," Ariadne said softly.

"Yeah. Me, too."

***

Ariadne looked out of the hotel window to the beachfront. The waves crashed into the sand, and no one was out. It was starting to get chilly, and it wasn't exactly a good time to be on vacation. "We'll be here for a day or two to be sure that no one checks the airports for us," Arthur told her, watching her watch the waves. "There's no point in breaking you out just to have them catch you again."

"What information do you have for me, then? I might as well get started while we wait."

There was the ghost of a smile on his lips, and Ariadne missed it when it was gone. She wondered why that would be, given that she had never met him before, but the thought slipped out of her mind as he nodded and moved to retrieve a briefcase from beneath the bed. "This is the hardest job I've ever had," he admitted in a soft voice.

Ariadne knelt down beside him to peer under the bed, then turned to look at him. "Why's it so difficult?"

"I'm looking for someone that doesn't want to be found."

"Sounds ominous."

"Just difficult, really." Arthur smiled at Ariadne, and she felt something curl in her stomach. It almost felt like anticipation. "But I've always liked a challenge."

Ariadne grinned at him in response. "Me, too. It's more fun when you win that way."

Their faces were close and they were breathing in each others' air. It was wonderful and intimate and fucking scary at the same time; Ariadne looked away first. "So. Tell me about this job."

That sad look came back on Arthur's face. "There was a job, and the subject was more militarized than we thought. We had to go down a few layers to get what we needed. I think we all got separated while riding the kicks back up." He pulled the briefcase out and put it on the bed. "I have everything from the job right here, but I need help finding my way back."

"What do you mean? I thought you said you needed a maze?"

"I'll find her at the heart of the maze. Isn't that the way of things?"

Ariadne frowned. "But wait... She'd come to a maze you have built in the real world? Or in dreams?"

Arthur opened the briefcase and all Ariadne could see were pages of numbers and blurry text, picture of buildings that looked vaguely familiar. She rifled through them, and found a chess piece within the briefcase. She picked it up, frowning at Arthur. "But..."

It didn't feel right. She didn't know how she knew it, but it was _wrong._

She turned to Arthur, a frown in her brows. "This is wrong."

"Lead me out of the maze, Ariadne," Arthur said in a soft, fragile voice. He let his hand fall over hers, squeezing slightly. It only stressed the wrongness in the piece clenched in her fist.

She couldn't remember the name the hospital tried to give her, couldn't remember how long she had been in that place. She couldn't remember why she had been there, why they had caught her in the first place. She couldn't remember why the nurses all insisted that she wasn't who she thought she was. She didn't know why she was in Switzerland, why there was somehow a beachfront hotel. She should have realized that detail sooner, but she hadn't recognized it when she saw it.

But Arthur was familiar in a way she couldn't name. He knew to call her Ariadne, knew that a case full of vague photographs and a chess piece could resonate with her. There was something there, at the tip of her tongue, like an itch in her brain.

"That number," she began slowly. "025981. That was the combination on the safe."

There was relief in his expression, though it was guarded. He was afraid to hope. "What else do you remember?"

Ariadne could hear the sound of crashing outside, as if buildings were collapsing. She was drowning in Arthur's eyes, ignoring the fear that it should have spiked. "We were looking for information. But the safe was locked, and you couldn't get in fast enough."

His hand was tight on hers, only the faintest of trembles in it. "What happened next?"

"I was here," she whispered, feeling a chill roll through her. "Am I in limbo?"

He gave a soft laugh and moved to cup her face in his hands. "God, I thought I'd never find you. I've been looking for you for years."

"Years?"

"Well, maybe it only feels that way." He smiled his crooked smile, and a painful thing broke in her chest. How could she have forgotten Arthur? How could she have forgotten her grip on reality? Why had it come to this?

"I forgot you. How could I forget you?"

"It's all right. I found you." He kissed her, hands sliding around her to hold her tight. She let the chess piece fall to the floor with a dull thud that sounded wrong and wound her arms around him. "I found you, Ariadne. I _found_ you."

"Now what?"

"Find the center of the maze. We'll find an elevator at the center of it, and we'll ride it back up."

"I thought we needed kicks?"

"This is your world, Ari," he said gently. "An elevator can be a kick if you want it to be."

She pressed her face against his chest and the world seemed to spin out around her. Everything blurred at the edges, and when she opened her eyes again she was in the middle of a hedge maze. She led him through the maze, red thread trailing from the coat she had somehow started wearing. Arthur kept his hand locked tight on hers, not willing to let her go. He kept his eyes on her, with that look of fear and hope and disbelief mixed together on his face. He was scared that if he let go, she would disappear again. If he turned his face away, someone else would be there clutching at his hand so desperately.

Why had she never known he loved her?

Up through the levels they went, tension bleeding out the higher they went. On the top level, they were on the rooftop of a building, wind whipping past them at a dizzying rate. "Together, on three."

Ariadne quirked her lips into a smile. "Let's just jump. No count, no preparation. We just tip over the edge and fall."

Arthur held both of her hands as he nodded. "And then we'll wake in the real world."

Wind rushing upward as they fell, Ariadne decided it didn't matter if this was real or a dream of limbo. None of that mattered. This was better than pills or being called 025981 by hospital staff. This was better than feeling as though something was missing, something was wrong.

This was all that mattered, and this was all that she needed to feel real.

The End


End file.
